Five Year Update 5

[Haf]

There have been many threads in this forum in the past that discussed the future of engineering in the US. I came across this article today:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,194696,00.html

It appears the current US job market is overall very strong, and here's the third paragraph of the article:

"In great demand are engineers and technology workers (no surprise there) but also accountants due to the increased need for financial controls and reporting, says John Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the Chicago outplacement firm."

I started my career five years ago, and joined eng-tips just a few months later. I remember seeing a lot of doom and gloom forecasts for engineering in these fora back then (quite disheartening for a new grad!). Well, five years later, things are looking pretty good!

I realize it's only five years, but note the title of this forum! Maybe I'll be singing a different tune in another five years.

 

[davefitz]

Haf;
In 5 yrs, if you are working as an engineer, you will likley be singing the tune in Urdu or Mandarin.

 

[zdas04]

davefitz,
I heard the same outsourcing concern when I started my career 26 years ago. I'm betting heavily that 5-10 years from now we'll still be wishing we had more quality engineers within whatever country we're in. There will always be local overages that will be compensated by national shortages. If you're locked into a physical location then disruptions are a real problem. If you're flexible then a good engineer will always have options (sometimes the options seem to be limited, but that is more often a failure of perception rather than a real curtailment in opportunity).

I know there are engineers out there that are under employed or un-employed and have been for many months. To them I say "widen your horizons". I get 5 job offers a week in Oil & Gas (and I'm not looking) and to take them I'd only have to let the company move me and my family to Oklahoma City or Elk City, OK; Casper or Rock Springs, WY; or anyplace in Texas. Not in Oil & Gas? Have a moral aversion to Oil & Gas? Then you are welcome to starve in the dark.

I firmly believe that working or not working is more about attitude than any other single factor. If you're sitting in a depressed industry worried about Urdu-speakers taking your job then you can either: (1) develop your skills in a direction that makes you irreplacable; (2) change industries/locations; or (3) starve in the dark (or sell shoes on commission).

Haf, good for you. I'm glad that you find a better world after 5 years than you anticipated at graduation.

David

 

[quark]

Good points by David. If Urdu is a mistake for Hindi, I wish to put some comments in Indian prespective. It has been 11 years since I started my career and 6 years since I got some expertise in my field. I have yet to see a second line of engineers that can take our responsibilities, a bit.

By the time I came out of college, we were 30 mechanical engineers and now I am the only engineer continuing in a job related to the subject. Others switched to software. The trend still continues and it is hard to find good engineers who are interested in fields other than software.

If the same situation persists, we may have to encourage foreign engineers to our country with in a short period of time.

 

[Beggar]

David, how does somebody with 15 years experience in a variety of fields but zero knowledge of oil and gas get themselves noticed and hired in that industry?

I'd seriously consider it but from what I can tell, they (like everybody else) wants either new graduates or folks with germane experience.

Given your history, it's no wonder that you're getting the offers.

--------------------
How much do YOU owe?

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

--------------------

 

[zdas04]

Quark,
I hear you, I've been talking with a firm in India about designing a pipeline for them--seemed an interesting twist.

Beggar,
"Germane" is a very slippery concept. You probably can't go from a mechinism FEA job in Michicagan into an offshore pipeline job, but there are a lot of places in Oil & Gas crying for an ME that can comprehend the reason that you need a charge pump in front of a plunger pump.

When I was in Tulsa in 1982 the guy in the next office had been a design engineer for GM who got downsized. He looked at the Detroit job market and moved to Houston on his own dime. He banged on doors, joined a car club (and met a bunch of Oil & Gas Engineers), and signed up with a head hunter. It took him 3 weeks (back then) to get on with Amoco. He never said which step landed the job, but one of his co-workers was in the car club.

There are many companies currently paying their employee's a Bounty for bringing in new workers. Houston is good, Denver and Dallas work well, even Midland/Odessa is booming for the first time in 20 years. Look at the local newspapers online and pick a target. Gumption is an important component of success.

David

 

[davefitz]

zdas04:
Good points expressed . I do not really have any concerns about outsourcing or guest workers, and I am just expressing my estimate of what the trend is. In my situation, I have no concerns regarding competition for employment, and welcome the advantages of competiton.

In the electric power industry and in the oil+ gas industry ( and apparently also aerospace , nuclear, and auto industries), they expect approx half of the engineers to retire in the next 5 yrs. There is a huge amount of pressure being placed on the gov't to allow an unlimited number of work visas for technically qualified immigrants, and if this does not come to pass, then outsourcing will increase.

The trend toward more foreign technical workers is the natural result of the nexus of improved telecommunications, the age "bubble" in the mentioned industries, the low birth rate in the US, the dumbing down of the educational system in the US, and the adoption of elements of "market democracy" in many asian countries. To the extent that service industries ( including most office based engineering jobs) relocate overseas via outsourcing, there will be a shift in economic , political, and eventualy military, power to other nations. Some folks theorize that such a trend eventually leads to 2 alternatives: either the end of the nation-state , or another global conflagration. Stay tuned.

 

[ziggi]

davefitz,

First off, English language training is one of the hottest businesses in China at the moment.

Second, I don't think outsourcing is the demon it's made out to be, I've worked with both Chinese (Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong) and Indian engineers and I find them to be very intelligent and well educated, with regards to theory only. Application....that's another shoe, the emphasis in their educational systems is on math and science, not engineering.

Third, Indians are sticklers for bureaucracy and Chinese are sticklers for timeliness, meaning that Indians spend an inordinate amount of time on the paperwork and little on the actual engineering, whilst the Chinese rarely work the extra or odd hours that Western employers demand.

I do agree that we are heading towards equalisation with the East, in terms of standard of living and economy. However I don't see the world's most militarily powerful nations giving up their military secrets, and source of their strength, in exchange for a few bucks, at least not until they develop something better for themselves.

Even if the outsourcing demon is set loose, the work will eventually come back. Fully developed nations (China and India in a few years), suffer from population attrition. Ie. the poor masses work hard to become middle class, their children see the squalor that large families can live in and choose to have 2 kids to maintain their standard of living and presto you have economically controlled population control. Leading to labor shortages and outsourcing.

I have the feeling that 10 years down the road people will be on here complaining that the Kenyans are taking their jobs, or it will be some Indian guy from Mumbai complaining about how he worked hard and now all his kids want to do is sit around and watch Bollywood and play on their Bollystation video games.

 

[ajack1]

I think China may take more than a few years to have a labour shortage.

 

[HgTX]

How relevant is the notion of "economically controlled population control" in China?

Hg

Eng-Tips policies: faq731-376

 

[ziggi]

ajack1,
Both China and India, already have labour shortages now, at least for skilled professions such as engineering. To be exact they have plenty of "engineering" grads, but very few graduates come from strong engineering programs.
As an aside, India is already outsourcing some of its telemarketing work to East Europe.
As another aside, the world's engineering work is slowly going to East Europe, simply because alot of the Eastern European educational programs are based on Russian models which are heavily weighted towards teaching technical and scientific issues. Cultural similarities are also a factor.

HgTx,
Even with government controlled population control in China, the population of China is growing rapidly, people just pay the fine or find other ways to have more children. To the Chinese, having many children is seen as a way to prosperity. When properity comes from other sources, two things happen, first, people don't try so hard to buck the population control laws, second, people see that children are not necessary to attain prosperity, in fact they are seen as a burden, thus less procreation.

 

[sms]

Great post Zdas! Our operations in Asia are hurting for engineers every bit as bad as our operations any where else.

Houston is the place if you are a mechanical or electrical engineer. Housing is still cheap, and work is plentiful.

-The future's so bright I gotta wear shades!

 

[moltenmetal]

Haf: Yeah, times are great for oil and gas engineers in Houston and Edmonton. But boom times come and go on an industry by industry basis. The trouble is, whenever an industry is in a boom condition, the business associations lobby governments to "open the taps" on the supply of whatever they feel short of. They hit the media and cry about shortages of skilled workers. The trouble is, they become SILENT the second the boom times are over- nobody is left to turn off the tap again!

Just like you heard doom and gloom stories here about engineering prospects five years ago, for the past 20 years I've heard media stories warning of a dire and looming shortage in biotechnology, IT, hydrogen technology, oil and gas etc. While business continues to define "shortage" as "an inability to find ten qualified candidates with direct experience to choose between, within 1 week of looking, without offering any premium over industry average wages and benefits, without the need to train, and indeed willing to take a short-term contract position", then I guess we'll be in shortageland forever. Industry wants a "flexible" workforce: cheap, plentiful, cowed and willing to take work under the terms they dictate. And they expect these conditions to apply even to regulated professionals like engineers- and get annoyed and cry shortage whenever it isn't so.

Take the high-tech boom as an example. Ten years ago, when I was a poor unfortunate soul working as an environmental engineer, civ eng grads were crying to me for an opportunity to work for free to gain some experience. At the time, the "smart" ones did a 1-year course in Java programming or the like and found jobs far more lucrative and plentiful than civ eng was at the time. Unfortunately, 2001 came along, the IT boom was bust, and half of those kids were out of work with little hope of ever falling back on their civ eng degrees. And guess what- in 2006, consulting companies here are complaining that there's a shortage of civ engineers with 10 years of local market experience. Go figure!

I have neighbours down the street. Both were educated as chem engs, but neither of them are doing engineering of any kind. At current it's estimated that less than 50% of Canada's engineering grads go on to work as engineers. Yep, sounds like we have a desperate shortage of engineers in Canada, eh?!

Then consider that about 8-10,000 foreign-trained engineers settle in Toronto alone every year, compared with a Canadian bachelor's engineering graduate class of, you guessed it, 10,000! And then they wonder why so many of them end up driving taxicabs or doing other survival jobs to get by!

If you're smart, creative, have some communication skills in written and spoken English, and have an engineering degree, are willing to move to find a job, and have a reasonable work ethic, there won't be much trouble for you to find something to do for a living. But whether or not you find work suitable to your education, skills, aptitudes and interests, in a place you and your family would actually enjoy living in, for compensation levels which truly respect your professional status as an engineer- that's something which is strongly dependant on supply and demand.

Engineers who think that their sacred profession is somehow "above" supply and demand really p*ss me off. Damn it, for once I'd like to see a real, actual engineering shortage rather than one merely reported in the media!

 

[ARenko]

As Zdas and sms have said, O&G and Houston is the place to be. I've been out of O&G for 5 years (my first 5 years being in O&G) and about to get back in. Don't let the job requirements fool you - they need engineers badly. They may say they want someone with 10 years subsea experience, but they'll take you if you've got the basic skills/ experience they need such as pressure containing equipment, fluid power, structural, project management, whatever....

 

[zdas04]

Moltenmetal,
Good points, Supply and Demand in job markets are always local. Job markets are cyclical. Eventually the current boom in Oil & Gas will bust. But, we've just come out of a 17 year depression in the industry and from 1986 to 2003 hiring was near zero and layoffs cost about half the jobs in the industry. Maybe we were truly fat and lazy in 1986, but I don't think we were overstaffed by a factor of 2.

The result of this was that the number of new hires during that period was vanishingly small, many universities eliminated their Petroleum Engineering departments altogether, and there is a huge experience gap. The SPE estimates that today the average Oil & Gas worker is 52, they estimate that the average in 2016 will be 32 and that 75% of the people who will be working in the industry in 2016 are not working in the industry today.

Someone wanting to enter the industry might find themselves in the frozen wastes of Drayton Valley, AB or the fetid swamps of Layfette, LA (both are actually really nice towns), and that may not be "a place you and your family would actually enjoy living in" but it beats driving a taxi.

I'm sure the bust will come, but I don't see it in the next few years and an engineer with 3-4 years hands-on experience with a good work ethic and a good attitude might just survive the next bust (half the industry survived the last one).

David

 

[Ashereng]

Drayton Valley is not a frozen waste. I am looking down and it looks pretty spring'ish.

I agree. The next 5 years out, O&G is looking good. Heck, even the next 10 years out is looking good.

Most engineering skill are portable across industries. A valve is a valve. A heat exchanger is an heat exchanger. The application and specific practices vary, but for the most part, they are portable.

I see good things in the horizon for O&G engineering. Knock on wood.

"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."
Albert Einstein
Have you read FAQ731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[metengr]

In the Power Generation sector (which I have spent the last 24 years), there has been interesting articles regarding the "aged" workforce, and how there will be mass retirements, etc. Outsourcing is being done on a very limited extent because you still need experienced engineers to operate and maintain Power Stations – this is a fact that will never change.

Frankly, I don't see how the mass retirement scenario is going to happen with the current state of health care in the US. I am seeing more and more of our bargaining unit workers and management personnel remain on the job because people are living longer, and the concern is "if I retire now I will possibly outlive my retirement resources". I remember vividly 5 years ago the dire predictions by our upper management at one of our generating station that 30% of the work force will be gone. Well, guess what, it has been 6 years since, and less than 1% has left for retirement. The state of the economy and out-the-door packages are the main drivers for retirement, and I don't see either happening any time soon.

I am also seeing fewer and fewer out-the-door retirement packages that were commonplace in the 80's and 90's. I think what is finally happening is that in the Power Generation business companies are finally realizing that the aged work force is smarter and equally as productive as new hires (foreign or otherwise). New hires need to be mentored and trained at great expense. This was commonplace with many electric utilities in the 80’s.

For us seasoned workers with hands-on engineering disciplines, I see nothing but good sailing ahead because there are fewer engineers that want to get into Power Generation.

 

[zdas04]

Ashereng,
I've only been there between September and April, snow on the ground and in the air every time. Still a really nice little town (is the old Amoco Building still the town's showplace? There is a woman in Farmington who says she got married in the atrium of that building).

David

 

[Ashereng]

David,

I am not aware of the Amoco Building. I know the Black Gold (Best Western) really well (free videos), and the roads out of town to my sites. Usually, I see the town in night time - I leave in the dark and return in the dark. Typical.

The town has seen a lot of growth from what people tell me. The old Esso or Amoco office complex is being converted to a business center? Should be done for a while now I guess. Maybe that is what the lady was referring to?

"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."
Albert Einstein
Have you read FAQ731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[waross]

"Someone wanting to enter the industry might find themselves in the frozen wastes of Drayton Valley, AB"
Drayton Valley would be downtown civilization compared to Ft. McKay, and probably a lot warmer.
There are probably a lot more entry level jobs in Ft. McKay than Drayton Valley.
I left Ft. McMurray in the mid 70's rather than move the family there. As I remember, summer started Tuesday morning that year and ended about noon Friday.
respectfully